


Pfaster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!

by feldman



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Early Work, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-06-30
Updated: 2000-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-05 02:22:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1801891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feldman/pseuds/feldman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why does Scully hold her gun gangster-style? Because there's a difference between taking down a perp and popping a cap in someone's ass.  Post-Orisen [originally posted to Scullyfic and Gosssamer in 2000]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pfaster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!

One of her speakers is blown from the R&B blaring on her stereo, and I can barely hear myself screaming at Pfaster to get down on the floor. I shift my feet, tighten my fingers, and she shuffles into the thick of it, a sleepy child heading for the cartoons early Saturday morning.

As someone who's checked out of the Heartbreak Hotel of reality a few times myself, I recognize the look on her face like a tattoo on the forehead reading, "Dissociative Episode".

Her gun comes up in one hand, lazily tipped. I've seen her take aim many times, always two-handed straight from the shoulders, eyes wide, not only for good aim, but for peripheral vision in case someone wants to take a crack at her from the side. She's never been as good as I have about sharing her gun.

But this is not the professional Agent Scully in trained stance, arms braced and triangular like a Ouija board planchette channeling Justice herself. This barefoot woman in rumpled silk pajamas has tapped into something more primal than Law, her casual calm betraying an absence of rational thought. Despite her Buddhist monk expression, each bullet hits home as Pfaster falls in a pinball trajectory to the carpet. 

She's damn lucky her gun doesn't jam with it tipped like that, lucky that I'm there to catch it from her loose fingers before it falls to the floor.

~*~

She comes back out of her bedroom with a blanket pulled around her ruined pajamas. I realize that it's now my job to run interference against the paramedics and officers I've just called.

I don't touch her just yet. "Some fight."

She replies in her office-standard voice; placid, precise, and a bad dub coming from her bruised mouth, "He bound me and shoved me into the closet. Then he started the bath." She hitches the blanket tighter around her shoulders. "I'll have some muscle soreness tomorrow, but I'm fine."

I glance down at the bare feet peeking out from under her blanket. The nails are polished a frosty peach color, and one instep is spattered with blood from the necrophiliac lying dead not ten feet away. Her face is clean because she's wiped the blood off out of habit, the same as I occasionally push up glasses that aren't there.

I tell myself that the sick flutter in my chest is fear; for what could have happened, for what did happen, for what her reaction will be to what she has done. And yes, there's fear and anger and concern, all those things I should be and have been in the times before. Except this time, it's not that simple.

~*~ 

It's been over forty minutes and the steam permeates my bathroom, dripping down the mirror like tears through sweat. I coax her out of the shower with a soft reasoning tone and gentle yanking on her wrist. I give her a towel, her overnight bag and some privacy. 

It clearly states in our Playbook that in moments when we can't hide our pain, we acknowledge it simply and then leave each other in peace to regroup. The I'm Fine Play, sometimes followed by the Ditch Maneuver. Our understanding that we would show minimum vulnerability to each other has served, more or less well, for years now. A brilliant design that proves less than adequate in practice, but is too annoying to replace with anything better.

But we've been deviating from the book lately, and freestyle requires flexibility.

In moments she's sitting on my couch, wedged up against the back cushions with her feet dangling just above the floor. She doesn't react to the mug of cocoa I give her or the first-aid kit in my hand. I had a one-liner prepared about having to raid her kitchen for the kit and the cocoa, but she's clearly not up for banter. I sit on the coffee table, pull one of her feet into my lap and free it from the thick parti-colored sock.

It's pruney and hot, but unharmed. I replace the sock and inspect the other foot. There's a nasty cut along the side, shallow but long. The edges of the cut are swollen from the shower, and I have to pull it open to search for glass. She doesn't flinch, just sips at the cocoa, but I try to distract her anyway. "These socks look warm."

Her office voice answers, as if the socks are tagged and bagged on my desk, a mysterious lump in a manila file. "Mom made them."

I caulk the gash on her foot with antibacterial ointment. "I always knew she could kick Martha Stewart's ass."

She presses the mug against her chest. "It's strange, Mulder. You think about how you might react to something, and sometimes that's exactly how you feel. This time, I can't even remember how I thought I should feel."

"How do you feel, then?"

She takes a deep breath, as if the heat of the shower has restored suppleness to her ribcage. "Relieved. Numb. I keep having inappropriate thoughts."

I peel a Band-Aid. "That you're alive is appropriate enough. I think you self-censor more than Skinner."

"Skinner doesn't have to get brain out of his carpet."

Morbid humor is an excellent sign. "How much do we really know about Uncle Walty, though?"

I get a dry chuckle for that.

I realize that my thumb is stroking the notch between her big toe and the ball of her foot. I let it slow to a stop and meet her bloodshot eyes with my best poker face. Her busted mouth makes a vague little moue. I gesture with the other hand. "Another round?"

She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back against the couch. Her toes flex around my thumb. When she speaks, her voice has that dreamy Peppermint Patty tone she gets when she bares her soul. "Until tonight, shooting you was the worst thing I've ever done."

I'm getting to like this sick flutter. "I prefer to think of it as checkmating my delusional paranoia with Stockholm Syndrome. It was one of the best vacations I've ever had." 

"You were delirious the whole way." She confides an uncomfortable smile. "I felt guilty so I gave you extra pain medication."

"It's the only way to drive through the Great Plains."

This time a genuine smile flickers, then dies. "It was a terrible decision to make, but I made it and lived with it. This...this was no decision. I killed a man without thinking, Mulder."

I peer down at the foot cupped in my hands, feel the warmth of it against my thigh.

A man who would have done much worse to you.

A man who was of no value to the society that spawned him.

A man who might've already been executed by the state, had he been sentenced in Texas.

She knows all this. She's heard it from me and from the officers at the scene. There will be formalities and paperwork, but the action was a sound one with a weight of reason in its favor. None of those reasons are the reason she pulled the trigger, but we are the only two people alive who know that.

"How do you deal with it?" Her eyes are tired and unfocused, but they pin me effortlessly.

"It?" I'm stalling. We both know what question she's asking. It's the reason she's here, letting me see the painful aftermath. How do you reconcile yourself to the consequences of thoughtless, ill-conceived actions? How do you live with your own stupidity?

She's pulled a Mulder and she needs to know the proper follow-through.

I slip the sock back onto her foot. I'll bet Jesus didn't feel creeped out by his disciples. But then, the foundation of his whole enterprise was that he was someone people should emulate.

Her foot escapes and tucks itself underneath its partner. "I take a hot bath, or a long walk. I write, or sleep. Sometimes I pray. What do you do that helps?" The raw need in her eyes resonates with the sick flutter in my chest, making me dizzy and strange.

I can't escape the irrational feeling that I've caused this. Band-Aid wrappers flutter to the floor as I pivot away and stand. I speak for myself as much as for her, "You need escapist entertainment."

I run my finger along the boxes of tapes on my shelves, hearing myself yammer in a light lecturing tone. "Never trust television. You can flip for hours and never find what you need. Enter the videocassette. If I judge your mood correctly, you need something simple and light. Something with a flawed but likeable hero fighting against an amusing villain. A plot with a well-defined goal and a satisfying ending. Definitely a comedy."

I turn to see her staring at me as if I've been speaking Urdu. "You deal with tragedy by watching comedies?"

Comedies and porn. I can really only cry for about an hour, after that I need diversion. "Television is the ultimate drug."

"I don't want to be drugged, Mulder."

I tap my tape of 'Young Frankenstein' against my leg, deciding whether to coddle or cajole. "You'd rather sit here, dragging yourself through the last few days over and over again? Getting nowhere, driving yourself crazy?"

"Well, no, but..." she gives her empty mug a tired waggle.

I sit back down on the coffee table, and peer out the window for a moment. When I finally turn to her, her need has softened into frank expectation. "You feel you made a mistake." 

Her voice is thick. "Yes." 

"Can you fix this mistake?"

She shakes her head solemnly. "No."

"So we're agreed that you can only make it worse."

She looks down into the empty mug, eyebrows raised and mouth open as if to speak, but she only takes a deep breath.

I take the mug from her, set it behind me, and fold one of her hot little killer's hands in both my own. "Your mistake was to be human. I'm not going to help you punish yourself for that. I can't. You saved Dana Scully's life. How can I hold that against you?"

She takes hold of the meaty part of my thumb and pulls me to sit next to her on the couch. "It's not that." She looks away into the fish tank, distractedly stroking her fingers between mine. "Sometimes I see things, Mulder. Things that aren't real." 

For a moment I don't even feel the soft nervous slide of her fingers. As often happens, my mouth kick-starts my brain. "Visions."

"Cerebral misfires brought on by lack of sleep, maybe, or transient hallucinations from stress. I know enough about the brain to realize that everything I see is not necessarily reality. I've seen things, Mulder, but I've always ignored them, filed them away." Her solemn eyes meet mine, and she gives my hand a warm deliberate squeeze that I feel in my chest. "Until today. Today, I didn't even question what I saw, I just acted." 

I've spent years tutoring her that the world is more dangerous and wonderful than she had imagined, trying to pry open her preconceptions and insert a brain more like mine into her head: make her the Bride to my Monster.

"Sometimes..."

And here she sits, leaning into me with a yawn. "Sometimes, Scully, there's nothing wrong with that."

More dangerous and wonderful than even I had imagined.


End file.
